i second the plea. Autocad is one of those applications that many windows users NEED to have working to even consider a change to linux, even at the enterprise level many would switch for it. the other day i had a friend in Naval Engineering ask me if it was possible to use Autocad in wine so he could use Linux, i had to sadly put his hopes down.
2009/4/28 Luke Benstead kazade@gmail.com
Hi all,
I've been watching the DIB engine work that has been going on in bug 421. It looks like Max has made massive progress getting Autocad working by the sound of it, almost perfectly and also improvements in Starcraft have been reported. However, he accepts (and Alexandre has confirmed) that neither of the two approaches he has tried is the right one and he believes (as do others) that any correct approach requires massive changes to GDI32, which if I read it right, no one seems to know how to do incrementally.
Autocad is one of those apps, like Photoshop, which people need to be able to use and won't switch away from Windows without it. In fact, Autocad more so than Photoshop because there is no (almost) feature equivalent alternative available (like the GIMP for Photoshop). So it's frustrating to know that someone has it working, but vanilla Wine isn't going to see it working in the near future.
My question is this: does anyone know how to incrementally implement the necessary changes? Is it even possible? If it's not possible, is it work considering branching Wine to implement it correctly, for merging back into trunk at a later stage once it's been thoroughly tested? I'm wondering if Wine's development process just doesn't allow for a big change like this, and perhaps it's the development model that is the reason bug 421 is so long standing?
Any thoughts, I just want to spur some discussion on this because it seems that everyone that attempts a DIB engine hits a wall :)
Luke.